As many of you know, I spend a lot of my free time developing educational games for the Nao robot platform to be used to help children with autism. It has been a busy few months getting new behaviours ready for the robot and getting them released into Aldebaran's ASK NAO solution.

I was lucky enough, in January, to be invited to visit Topcliffe Primary School in Birmingham, a school at &nbsp;the leading each of special needs education and one using Nao and the ASK NAO solution.

While I was there we had a visit from a journalist and were able to show him the robot working with the children with autism. Today the Telegraph newspaper's magazine includes an article about his visit. It's also available online here.

Back in May this year I posted two articles (1, 2) explaining a little about why robots are being used to help children with autism, and how they are being used. As I said back then, this is early days for this kind of work, and there is still a lot to learn and discover.

In this article I would like to expand on some of the things mentioned at the end of part 2, and I will do this by introducing two of the success stories where Nao has helped children start to achieve their potential. If you want to read the full articles they are over on the ASK NAO blog and I will link to the them at the end of the extracts.

One of the people who has been involved at Topcliffe Primary School is Dr Karen Guldberg, Director of the Autism Centre for Education and Research at Birmingham University. She has written a very interesting piece about why Nao works at Topcliffe and illustrated it with the following story about Daniel:

"Daniel is a lovely seven year-old boy with autism who enjoys playing with Max and Ben, the two NAO robots in his school. At the end of an event we organized at the school in November 2012, Daniel stood up on the stage and made an impromptu speech to an audience in the main hall of the school. He opened it with: “Ladies and Gentlemen, please listen to me. I have something important to tell you.”

He then proceeded to give the listeners a beautiful and imaginative ‘stream of consciousness’ speech welcoming everybody to his ‘robot museum’. His impromptu talk included a description about how the robots worked and how much he loved them. He held up postcards with pictures of NAO and his friend acted as his assistant. Daniel used the postcards to explain to the audience what NAO could do, how many different robots there were and what colours they were.

I cannot do Daniel justice or capture the magic of his words here, but I can tell you it was one of the high points of my year. The work with the robots had given this child the confidence to stand up in front of a big group of adults and give a speech. It had motivated him to find out all sorts of things about the robot, which he then explained to the audience. It helped him work in partnership with his friend who also has autism. And this is a child who has difficulties with social communication."

Queen Mary University London kindly allowed us to host the 2013 UK Nao London Hackathon at their wonderful facilities. We had developers come from all around the world and two days of Nao development, with lots of fun and pizza, was underway.

Here are a few photos and 3 of the breakout session videos. More photos can be found at Robert Triest's great site www.naornever.com. There is a flickr feed too, that our professional photogrpaher is updating over the next week or so and it also has last years photos there as well.